


A Question of Courtships

by RaisingCaiin



Category: Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: Cultural Differences, F/M, Fluff, Getting Together, Getting to Know Each Other, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-14
Updated: 2019-01-14
Packaged: 2019-10-10 06:25:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17420765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RaisingCaiin/pseuds/RaisingCaiin
Summary: After that coffee not-a-date with Anne, Venom thinks that Eddie still wants to be in a relationship with her, and they take matters into their own, errrr, tendrils.





	A Question of Courtships

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ashling](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ashling/gifts).



> for Ashling, who offered so many fantastic prompts that the hardest part was picking *one*

The first coffee-after (yes, that’s what Eddie has taken to calling it in his head, and Venom can stop with their smug little _and what’s_ that _supposed to mean, Eddie?_ at any time now, thank you very much) –

Anyway. The first coffee-after the whole Incident goes better than Eddie would have expected it to. Sitting on a doorstep in the cold with his ex and discussing Feelings and Consequences was never something that Eddie could have imagined he’d feel good about doing, but here they are and there it is. And as they talk, Anne is sympathetic without being pitying, sorry without actually being apologetic, and Eddie’s reminded all over again of why they used to get along so well before he started choosing his career and his need to sniff out secrets over Anne herself. There’s a weird pang in the region of his chest and Eddie may be a writer but he doesn’t believe in heartache, so instead of acknowledging his ex’s concerned questions he pretends that he’s finished his coffee and he has to go – pretends that there’s somewhere else he has to be besides sitting here talking to someone he used to consider close.

 _We’ll get her back,_ Venom promises as they walk away, and Eddie shoves his hands deeper into his coat pockets.

“Just barely got _you_ back, buster, and that’s already more than I thought I could have,” he grumbles, trying not to think about how easily he’s slipped into ranking an alien symbiote alongside the human woman he’s spent several years building an intimate relationship with.

Trying not to think about _why_ , either, if he’s being honest with himself.

 _That’s not a no_ , Venom notes with interest. _Do you people of this world always approach courtship in such tangled ways?_

“ _Courtship_?” Eddie splutters. It’s not a word he’s heard much outside of, like, nature documentaries about seahorses and birds of paradise and shit; it’s certainly not a word he’d ever think to apply to himself or Anne. “What the hell are you on about, _courtship?_ ”

Venom’s sigh seems to echo in every corner of his mind, and Eddie _also_ tries not to think too hard about how this sibilant voice has become a familiar presence instead of an alien intruder to be feared and fought. _Eddie. You want her the way you want us._

If Eddie were alone in his own body, he probably would have walked into a lamppost. But Venom takes over just in time and, with a sigh that’s equal parts exasperation and fondness, sidesteps his body around the impending obstacle before Eddie has a chance to break his nose or black his eye on twenty feet of solid iron.

Leaving Eddie free to whisper furiously: “ _What_?”

Others on the sidewalk give him odd looks, and it takes Eddie a moment to realize that it’s probably because it looks like he’s talking to himself. Oh, right – not everyone expects that rattily-dressed men on the street might be talking to the alien symbiotes inside their bodies.

 _You are so bad at this,_ Venom tells him, and Eddie gets the sense that if they were separate at the moment, then the symbiote would probably be trying to ruffle his hair. Ever since Venom learned about expressing affection this way, they haven’t stopped trying to get the gesture right. But then:

 _Maybe we should handle it ourselves instead,_ Venom muses, and Eddie snaps.

“There is no _this_ for you to handle!” he says, frantic – and, he realizes too late, at normal volume as he gestures in exasperation. A woman in a business suit exclaims and crosses the street to avoid walking beside him, and Eddie is too befuddled to do more than keep going.

 _Well, not the way you’re handling it right now, no,_ Venom says, sounding amused and a bit exasperated themselves. _Luckily you have us._ And that’s the last the symbiote has to say about the subject that day, and Eddie is so grateful the subject has been dropped that he doesn’t even think to question why.

Which, in hindsight, turns out to have been a tactical error. Because Venom doesn’t just _drop_ things.

Eddie is reminded of this fact very abruptly. It starts with a text from Anne, who writes that yes, sure she’d be happy to have him over to dinner later that week! Eddie, who is slightly sleep-deprived at the time, notices that there’s a text right above this one that he can’t remember sending. Hmmmm, he decides, must have been one hell of a bender, before crashing across his futon and sleeping so deeply that he forgets everything else for a while, including his own name.

(Also including that he got Venom back. So when he startles awake it’s with a kind of sheer panic that sends him bolt upright and can only be soothed by that voice in his head, Venom promising that _no, Eddie, we are still here, you are not alone anymore, we are here, we are here. . ._ And if Eddie ends up kind of giving himself a full-body hug, arms wrapped around his own torso for a while, then that’s no one else’s business, right?)

Eddie’s ongoing acquaintance with the fact that Venom doesn’t just drop things continues when he actually shows up at Anne’s place for the aforementioned dinner and _Dan_ is there as well.

Now, Eddie doesn’t actually have anything against Dan – the man is surprisingly adaptable, and alarmingly competent, and, ummmm, very much the picture of Eddie’s type in men if Eddie himself were single and looking to start dating again so soon.

( _If_ he were single? And ‘so soon’ after Anne broke up with him, or ‘so soon’ after Venom returned to him? Eddie mentally adds this ambiguity to the long and growing list of things he’s trying not to think about right now.)

Because Dan _is_ seeing Anne now, and it’s kind of strange, Eddie thinks, to be sitting across the counter from the two of them without feeling more than a slight pang at noticing how easily they work together to prep ingredients and put together a meal. They move around each other so effortlessly. They talk so easily. They look happy.

Venom is suspiciously quiet as Eddie observes this scene of domestic bliss, and that really should have been Eddie’s third sign that the subject of _courtship_ hasn’t actually been dropped, but in his defense Eddie is a bit distracted.  

“Good to see you looking better,” Dan tells him, punctuating the sentiment with a hearty slap to the back as he walks past the counter to grab a spice of some sort at Anne’s direction. It takes a moment for Eddie to recalibrate, to remember exactly how Dan has seen him the last few times: loitering outside his ex’s door, or ass-down in a restaurant tank full of lobsters, or yelling at an alien symbiote through an inch of medical glass. Yeah – compared to that, Eddie probably _is_ looking a hell of a lot better.

 . . . Feeling a hell of a lot better, too.

“Thanks,” he says instead, and it comes out as more of a grunt than he’d really intended it to, but Dan doesn’t seem to mind, and the man just smiles, surprisingly cheerful, as he walks past again.

Dinner is delicious, but it’s also a pasta dish that Eddie recognizes as the one Anne always tosses together when she’s stressed. He spends the meal planning and discarding different ways to ask her about this, since _she_ was the one to invite him and they’re sitting right here in front of her new boyfriend, but as usual Anne beats him right to the punch.

“You said you had something important that you wanted to talk to us about?” Anne finally prompts, setting down her fork. Eddie looks up to find her watching him across the counter – curiously, expectantly.

“I did?” All right, admittedly it’s not his most coherent, but – Eddie really doesn’t remember saying that in any way, shape, or form.

“You did,” Dan chimes in, mouth full and still shoveling pasta with a surprising lack of grace. “I mean, I was kind of surprised to see that you texted me as well, but you definitely did.”

A terrible suspicion is dawning, even as Eddie fumbles in his pocket for his phone. _Venom?_ he thinks. _Anything you should be telling me about here?_

 _Telling just you or telling all three of you?_ Venom asks, their tone surprisingly conciliatory, and Eddie is about to snap, _no of course just tell me_ when he’s finally able to pull up the text conversation in question. And of course it’s the one that he hadn’t paid much attention to a few nights back, but now that he’s looking at it, really looking at it, things jump out.

New group created. Anne, Dan, Eddie. An otherwise innocuous blue bubble asking _Hey, any time this week when I could drop by? Something really important I wanted to ask you both._ before Anne’s response inviting him for today and Dan’s string of thumbs-up emojis.

“Oh my god,” Eddie groans, and he only realizes that he’s said it aloud when Anne and Dan both look at him in concern. He groans again for good measure. “I didn’t send this.”

“Then who-“ Dan asks, already worried, but Anne cuts right to the same hypothesis she’d floated back when she and Eddie were having that first coffee-after.

“Eddie. Did the symbiote survive? Is it still with you?”

He can feel his facial muscles twitching in what wants to become a smile. He’s not sure if it’s his own impulse or Venom’s, and he finds that he actually doesn’t care either way.

“Eddie?” Anne asks, and there’s a warning in her voice now.

“Yeah,” Eddie replies, shortly. He’s trying to keep his voice gruff, sure – hinting _of course they’re back, moving on, nothing to see here_ – but he can’t quite keep out a trace of fondness, of wonder, of heart-breaking relief, and so the gruffness doesn’t quite land the way he’d intended it to. “Yeah, they’re still with me.”

“Oh my god,” Anne starts, at the same time Dan begins “Wait, wait, what? Are we talking about that alien symbiote here?” and Venom is laughing in short little wheezes in the back of Eddie’s mind. All in all, it’s a surprising cacophony of voices saying surprisingly much the same thing, and Eddie can’t quite keep himself from beginning to laugh as well at the unexpected hilarity of it all.

Thank goodness for Anne, once again cutting right to the chase as she points her fork right at Eddie’s nose across the counter. “So. What you’re saying is that you didn’t send that text message, but the symbiote did. Is that it, Eddie?”

Eddie’s mouth opens as Venom prepares to speak, but Eddie grabs his own chin and presses his mouth shut until Venom, grumbling a little, relinquishes motor control.

“Let me dig my own damn grave, please?” Eddie asks them when his mouth is free, finally guessing what the symbiote was probably going for with this whole elaborate setup. “You’ve gotten us this far, all right?”

Dan is watching the chin grab with concern; Anne is watching Eddie’s face with a little less concern.

“Dig your own grave?” Dan asks, worried. “ _Us_?” Anne asks, less worried. “Oh, Eddie. Sweetheart, I’m happy for you.”

Eddie will never forget that Anne had her own moment with Venom inside her, but he certainly doesn’t know exactly what she learned from the symbiote in all that time. About Venom themselves, or about Venom and Eddie, or about – well, about anything, really. But from her tone here – whatever Anne learned, it was enough that now she can at least _guess_ the sheer relief that Eddie felt when Venom returned, alive and well.

So:

“Yeah,” he tells her: very articulate, Eddie. “And when we had coffee the other day? They noticed that I still have feelings for you too.”

Anne’s eyebrows rise nearly to her hairline. “Eddie, don’t bullshit me. Venom knows I’m with Dan now.”

“Well, I noticed that Venom made sure to text him too,” Eddie mumbles, scrupulously avoiding eye contact with the doctor as he puts this out there.  

There’s a second’s thoughtful silence before Dan realizes: “Wait wait wait. Was this a _date?_ ” and Eddie can’t keep himself from laughing again because _yep_. He buries his face in his arms right there on top of Anne’s otherwise pristine counters and laughs til he can feel the tears gathering in the corners of his eyes.

Above his head he can hear Anne telling Dan “If that feels strange, maybe don’t think about how we were all set up by an alien symbiote who is apparently already dating _him_ ,” and Eddie just loses it all over again.

In the back of his mind Venom makes confused noises as they try to soothe him, and Eddie has to get himself together long enough to promise: _No, look, I’m ok, I’m fine._

 _We thought that the ritual of a meal made and eaten together was the first step of a courtship,_ Venom frets.

 _Well, usually everyone knows in advance that it’s gonna be a date, and usually there aren’t quite this many people involved, but you got the right-ish idea,_ Eddie promises them.

 _We weren’t sure if you wanted him too,_ Venom says, sounding almost apologetic.

 _Hadn’t even gotten that far,_ Eddie says, though now that they’re all here he’s realizing that of course he’d be a damn fool to say no to that face if it’s on offer. _Not a bad thing, just – you’re almost too good at this courtship thing, pal._

 _Really?_ Venom sounds like they’re preening.

There’s a lot that remains to be worked out, and one dinner and half a conversation are really only just the start of something that, if it works out, is going to take a lot, lot more effort. But as he finally pulls his face out of his arms and looks across the counter to where Anne and Dan are talking animatedly – Anne filling her boyfriend in on what else she knows about Venom – Eddie feels a tiny spark of hope.

 _If you have any other ideas, though, run them by me first?_ he asks Venom. _Or maybe – maybe by all of us, yeah?_

 _Will do,_ Venom promises, and Eddie grins as he feels a short tendril peel itself away from his scalp and softly ruffle his hair.


End file.
